So, this’ll be my second ludum dare (unless I get cold feet after seeing the theme). You can check out my first game here. The first time around I used LÖVE but this time I think I’ll try to do the game using Actionscript/Flixel. Graphics tools will be Photoshop (and possibly Modo if I need to render something) and audio/music will be done with Ableton Live. Coding is definitely my weakest area and this second ludum dare will probably be the second game I’ve programmed, ever.

The visual experience is already much better and there’s loads of functionality in: player can shoot buildings and the glass sphere. If the sphere breaks, it stops the player from moving over the gaps so once I get the enemies to shoot back (pictured here in yellow-green), it’ll be almost like a game already!

I’m making some new progress despite being severely slowed down by my coding “skills”. Here’s a screenshot:

Woohoo, my second Ludum Dare game (and pretty much the second game I’ve ever programmed) is done! With the help of some cuba libres, I managed to complete the last few missing pieces: the player sprite, the music and a little sprinkling of gameplay balancing. Composing the music was pretty painless and it took only less than two hours. It’s a pretty simple tune but a simple tune suits the simple game, I would say. It’s probably a little too downtempo regarding the pace of the game but regardless of that I think that the deep dub atmosphere suits the game well.

Anyways, check out the entry here. It’s Flash so no need to jump through any extra hoops to get playing.

Tags: as3, final, Flixel, ld23, screenshot

Here’s a time lapse from last weekend’s coding/graphics/sfx/music binge, also known as Ludum Dare! The soundtrack in the video is the music I created for the game. You can check out the game here!

As an added bonus, here’s the original “design document” I carefully crafted before writing a single line of code.

Tags: ld23, photo, timelapse, video

It’s been already two years since I participated in this jam (here’s Snowglobe Kerfuffle, my ld23 entry) previously and I’m really stoked about the jam again! This will be my third time and I’m almost completely certain that I won’t give up again before I have even gotten started. I guarantee that there will be no excuses this time like “the theme doesn’t inspire me” or the classic “I’ve got more important stuff to do”. Not this time.

I’ll be using these tools:
Engine: Unity 3D
Graphics: Photoshop, Mangastudio (don’t judge a software by its name!), possibly Aseprite
Audio: Ableton Live, VSTs (Zebra, Aalto, Kaivo…), hardware synths (Shruthi XT, Korg Volca Keys and Volca Bass)

My plan is to get an entry to a shippable condition during saturday and then during sunday concentrate on polishing and adding JUICE.

So, I had a hankering for some oldschool top down shootin’ so that’s what I started doing! The game will be set in a submarine where things have gone awry. You know, mutants, demons or something along those lines.

Here’s what I’ve got currently:

I’ve got the basic things down now like health, weapons, simple monsters, items and a very cheaply made LOS (the shadows are just tall black boxes on top of the walls and the parallax of the camera handles the rest). I’m almost at my goal of getting a “shippable quality” game on day 1 so after just a few functionality enhancements like game over and level change tomorrow morning, I can mostly concentrate on content creation and polishing. I hope I can bring in more of the compo theme then too since it’s currently almost completely absent at this point.

Next up: Sauna, supper and rest!

I made a pumping song for my game, Bathyscaphe11:
https://soundcloud.com/john-peeba/bathyscaphe11-soundtrack/s-W6MOi

Overall, the whole process went super smoothly since I’ve been doing songs in the same vein lately so I had a pretty good routine. I used Ableton Live and its built in instruments as well as U-He Zebra VST.

Pickle lad is going places! There’s now a half-complete kitchen environment (my “one room”), better character movement and some music I just made! The music might not fit the mood very well yet but I don’t have time to redo it either… So let’s hope I can amp up the gameplay to match it somewhat

Tags: music, progress, video